Literary Yardsticks: Big-Picture Questions to Focus Your Revisions
Turn around a chronically rejected manuscript—measure each choice by how it serves your book's genre identity, intended readership, and page-turning tension.
—Annie Mydla, Managing Editor
What to do with the chronically rejected manuscript? I see hundreds of books each year with a similar backstory: the project is the author's first or second. It started from a small seed of inspiration and has grown and changed over the years. Editing decisions are informed by what beta readers liked and disliked and what felt good to the author personally. No matter what tweaks the writer makes, though, agents just don't seem to be interested. And not only that, but none of the feedback the writer has received from beta readers, fellow authors, friends in the industry, paid editors, or others has seemed to get to the heart of why that might be.
Authors I've spoken to over the years tend to chalk these rejections up to content choices. "My portrayal of Cassie's chemotherapy must not have been compelling enough." "Maybe my story needs more action." "I guess it must not be clear yet that David's rupture with his parents is part of a generational cycle." "Maybe the agent doesn't like that I'm writing a character of this ethnicity or culture, when I myself am from a different ethnicity or culture."
In a way, it makes sense that writers assign lack of success to isolated pieces of content. Virtually all the feedback they've been getting is content-based: "I just wasn't connecting with Cassie." "What about a little more action?" Maybe that's why so many writers seem to believe that if only they could make the right tweaks to the right parts of the content, agents would finally accept the book.
Of course, as authors themselves already know, whether consciously or in their gut, the "just a few more tweaks till success" idea is virtually always a fantasy. Five, ten, twenty years of tweaks haven't been enough to garner agent interest. Something is wrong with the manuscript, deeply wrong. But it feels like no one can tell them, or (shudder!) no one is willing to tell them, the truth about what that problem might be.
An author at this stage might spiral into self-doubt. "I knew I wasn't any good." Or even, "My book is so bad that no one can bear to tell me the truth about how bad it really is."
It's tragic, but in all great tragedies, the pathos is spiced with irony. The fact is that these rejections have little to do with any one part of the book's content. The problem instead lies in the composition process. Specifically, a composition process that takes place without a thoroughly magical ingredient: yardsticks.
In writing, a yardstick is a big-picture value or goal that can be used to assess any and all edits, additions, and subtracts to a manuscript. Genre identity, intended readership, and tension are three especially helpful developmental yardsticks, because they're what agents rely on to make decisions about the book they read.
For any changes an author is thinking of making, asking a simple question like, "Would this change strengthen or weaken the genre identity I've chosen?" or "Will this choice increase page-turning tension, or decrease it?" can make the difference between making the book more salable and more agent-friendly, or less.
Even authors who are unacquainted with the concept of yardsticks will still use them unconsciously. For example, emerging authors often start projects with yardsticks like, "I'm going to go with decisions that make me feel good about my creativity" and "I plan to include content my family will find funny and touching." There's nothing intrinsically wrong with such an approach! The pitfall is what happens when authors carry these more personal standards into projects they hope will be accepted by the general market.
Writing a manuscript for agent submissions without agent-friendly yardsticks is all but guaranteed to cause a muddle in the manuscript and, all too often, an undeserved sense of rejection and failure in the writer. The writer can tell that something is off. Each successive rewrite causes sprawl, like an old New England home that keeps getting built onto, based on the family's needs and the available materials. But whereas such farmhouses did have some overarching principles that helped maintain basic livability and functionality, manuscripts that don't consider the big picture of tension, genre, and intended readership are often much more chaotic.
Beta readers sometimes deliver observations equivalent to, "How about a ballroom adjoining the bedroom? That could spice things up." "Kitchens are boring. You should put in a water park instead! I love water parks." Choosing yardsticks in advance can help authors avoid being swayed by ideas that don't serve their goals. The writer might come back at the beta reader by saying, "Hey, my book is actually a romantic enemies-to-lovers story about competing chefs, so I won't be replacing the kitchen with a water park." Later, the author might think to themselves, "If that beta reader thought the kitchen was boring, maybe I need to investigate whether my intended audience will feel the same," or "Is something about how the kitchen scenes are structured reducing page-turning tension? Do they run too long? Do any of them lack their own little climax?" All of a sudden, the amorphous task of editing can seem a lot more manageable.
So many times, I've seen lack of conscious yardstick usage kill timely, compelling premises. Imagine a book that starts out as a literary Middle Grade novel about a sensitive young girl who discovers her older brother is slipping into white nationalism. The first draft is written. But over the next few years, the manuscript picks up several subplots on seemingly unrelated topics, the cast list expands into the dozens, and the word count grows 20k too long for the genre. Parts of the book are now Young Adult, New Adult, and Adult instead of MG, with isolated bursts of graphic violence that feels incongruous and violates MG genre conventions. The rising action is flat because the reader has no idea where to look for plot emphasis, there's no real climax, and the falling action and resolution don't relate back to the original premise.
Reading that description, it might seem obvious that such a manuscript has issues far beyond simple content tweaks. But without yardsticks like genre identity, intended readership, and tension, it's hard even to describe why. Beta readers might open up the manuscript and start to feel uneasy, muddled, and put off, but not be able locate the deeper sources of those feelings because the problem seems too complicated. The whole task of investigating feels overwhelming. How do I know? Because this is the story I've heard over and over from writers describing feedback they've received—and given.
Apply yardsticks, and all of a sudden, our Middle Grade manuscript becomes much more manageable. The author combs the book for anything that would reduce the genre expression for MG: adults driving the plot, problems that are too big for MG to take on, graphic violence. Maybe then they look at tension: what is reducing the page-turning energy? They remove some B plots and prune back others to create plot emphasis on the central story, build up the climax, link the falling action and resolution back to the beginning, and cut and combine characters to consolidate the cast list. Finally, they go back over everything with their intended readers in mind: what will they enjoy and want more of? What might they be bored by or find distracting? The application of yardsticks doesn't need to happen in any particular order, though some books might especially benefit from certain ones.
Literary yardsticks don't help with everything. I've worked with plenty of writers who are simply attached to the sprawling versions of the book they've been working on for years. They don't want to streamline the book. They want to keep writing it. Some of these authors are genuinely frustrated that their book hasn't gotten an agent, but I think some rather enjoy the feeling of being misunderstood by the establishment, especially, for some reason, when the book is their first. They may self- or trad-publish other books while continuing to work on the one that feels almost mystically uncontainable. Sometimes a book is more than a book. It's a place for the writer to dwell.
Still, no writer ever need go through the feelings of confusion and rejection that follow long years of farmhouse-addition-style editing, and no beta reader need be overwhelmed or intimidated by the contradictions of such a manuscript. Literary yardsticks make editing and feedback manageable, and they're at every writer's and reader's fingertips. Try them out. You might be surprised at how quickly you feel direction and clarity. And for you authors whose book has been a place to dwell—if you want to try using yardsticks on your manuscript but fear you'd be eviscerating a longtime companion, you might try saving your old draft right at the center of your desktop screen in all its rambling glory. Your old friend can keep you company while you work on the separate, sibling version.
Categories: Advice for Writers, Annie in the Middle
